


Endure and Still Endure

by ryanthepowerbottomguy



Category: Rooster Teeth/Achievement Hunter RPF
Genre: Anachronistic Language, Interview With The Vampire AU, M/M, Pre-Relationship, Vampires, Violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-06-25
Updated: 2015-06-25
Packaged: 2018-04-06 03:25:35
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,645
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4206141
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ryanthepowerbottomguy/pseuds/ryanthepowerbottomguy
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Ryan goes out searching for trouble, but he does not expect a vampire to find him.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Endure and Still Endure

**_Savannah, Georgia; early 1800s_ **

The man tells Ryan that he is a sailor, and Ryan believes him; with those tattoos, he couldn’t be much else.

He is obviously lonely and more than a little inebriated, so Ryan lets him ramble about his travels, listening with only half an ear as he scans the rest of the bar. He has debts with several of the men he sees here, but the sailor’s presence seems to be keeping them away for now.

Eventually, though, the sailor wanders out of the bar. Not long after that, Ryan gets grabbed and dragged out to a dark, empty street. Ryan lets it happen, though he could fight back. He has no desire to.

That’s where the sailor finds him later: bloody and bruised in a dark alleyway. The sailor nearly trips over him before seeming to recognize his face, and his curse of annoyance turns to one of concern.

“Are you all right?” the sailor asks, crouching by Ryan’s side. In the dim light that pools from the lighted street beyond, Ryan can see the sailor’s blue eyes constrict and then dilate. “You’re the man from the bar, aren’t you? Christ.”

Ryan grins weakly, knowing that there is blood on his teeth from the way the sailor recoils.

“And I liked you, too,” the sailor says on a sigh. “Too bad.” And then he leans in close.

For a moment Ryan has a wild thought that the sailor is going to kiss him. But then he sets his mouth around the vein in Ryan’s neck and _bites_.

Ryan cries out weakly, clutching at the sailor and trying to push him away, but he is too strong. The pain is nothing like he has ever experienced, so much and so sharp that it overloads his senses until he can feel nothing but the man’s teeth in his flesh and the frantic beating of his own heart.

He feels like he is dying, and suddenly the thought of it terrifies him more than it should for a man who only hours ago was courting death at the hands of a gambler’s debt collector.

“S-stop,” Ryan begs, and to his surprise, the sailor does, pulling away from him almost immediately. Ryan can feel blood running in rivulets down his neck to stain his shirt.

“Fuck,” the man mutters. His lips are stained red. “For what it’s worth, I’m sorry.”

The next time Ryan blinks, the sailor is gone, and he is alone in the alley.

—

Surprisingly, Ryan survives the night. He wakes early the next morning, weak with hunger and blood loss, and manages to pick himself up and stumble back to the rooms he and Kerry rent.

His memories of the night before are unclear: he does not remember anything that transpired in the alley, and he can only guess at what happened by the wounds on his body.

Kerry is understandably worried when Ryan stumbles into the flat they rent. “What the hell happened to you?”

Ryan shakes his head weakly and lets Kerry guide him down onto his bed. “Don’t remember,” he mumbles. “There was a sailor.”

“Okay,” Kerry says. “Sleep this off, and you’ll be fine soon.”

—

Ryan is not, in fact, fine. Ryan quickly develops a fever that races heat and chill in equal measure across his skin. In the heat of the Savannah summer, he can’t get cool enough at any time of the day, and at night he cannot manage to get warm no matter what he does.

Kerry insists, on the third day, on calling on a doctor even though neither of them can pay for one. The doctor who comes by bleeds him some and fusses at the heat of his skin but can find no cause.

On the third night, when Ryan is sure that he is dying, the sailor appears. Across the room, Kerry is fast asleep, and the sailor walks so quietly that Kerry does not wake.

Ryan blearily watches the sailor sit at the edge of his bed.

“Christ,” the man swears. “I didn’t know this would happen. I can make it all stop, if you want. I can make the pain go away. All you have to do is agree.”

Ryan’s nod is small, barely a movement at all, but the sailor must see it. After all this, death sounds sweet, and he does not even consider turning down the offer. A moment later, the sailor bends over Ryan, his breath cool of the overheated skin of Ryan’s throat.

Memory floods back as the sailor presses a gentle kiss to the side of his throat before biting down. This time, Ryan does not have the energy to struggle or to even make a sound; this time, he welcomes his inevitable death with open arms.

But then the sailor pulls back, just as Ryan’s vision begins to go dark. Ryan closes his eyes, a whispered, “Thank you,” on his lips, and waits.

Something warm is pressed against his parted lips and a hot, coppery liquid spills onto his tongue. He allows it to happen, allows the liquid to run down his throat without protest.

“There,” the sailor whispers, petting at Ryan’s sweat-soaked hair. “Sleep, now. I’ll be back for you before tomorrow morning.”

Ryan is rolled onto his side, and and as he loses consciousness for what he hopes is the last time, he feels a gentle, wet cloth wiping away the blood on his neck.

—

When Ryan wakes next, he cannot move. This confuses him for a number of reasons.

It is dark and cool where he wakes up, and he is lying on something hard. No hint of the fever plagues his mind, now. Now, all he wants is sleep. His unfamiliar location does not bother him, though he knows it should. The close quarters are comforting and safe.

He drifts back into dark, dreamless sleep.

—

He is jostled back to full wakefulness some time later, and he opens his eyes to gentle moonlight pouring into his place of rest and illuminating the man standing over him: the sailor.

Ryan takes the hand that is offered to him without question. When he’s standing, he can see his resting place: a rectangular wooden box, surrounded by several feet of earth.

A coffin. A grave.

“I’m dead,” Ryan says, horror creeping into his voice. He thought that death would mean _rest_.

“Technically, yeah,” the sailor says with a grin. “You know, I didn’t expect them to bury you so fast.”

“I wouldn’t have had the money for a funeral,” he says absently, still staring at the wood of his coffin. He had been _buried_. He can’t wrap his head around the idea.

“Come on, let’s get out of here before someone mistakes us for graverobbers,” the sailor says.

Ryan knows the graveyard where he was buried — it’s the yard of the small Baptist church he and Kerry have attended for several years — but he has never seen it like this. It is like he is truly seeing for the first time in his existence: even in the moonlight, the green of leaves and grass is brighter and more lush, more _alive_ , than it had ever been before. He can see the cracks in the stone of the church some yards away, can hear the beating of a mouse’s heart as it scurries along the ground, can hear a couple arguing inside their house on the next block. He thinks that, if he were to stand still enough, he would be able to feel the earth breathe, would be able to watch the grass grow.

The sailor tosses a shovel at him. “Admire it later,” he says. “Help me fill in this hole.”

—

Ryan learns later, on the carriage ride out of Savannah, that the sailor’s name is Geoff Ramsey, and while he has been a sailor in the past, he currently has an estate outside the city.

“I’m a vampire, Ryan,” Geoff says. “And now so are you. I thought it right that I give you back the life I took from you — at least, as much as I could.”

Ryan does not say that he would have accepted death. He does not say that he had gone out looking for it. He doesn’t say anything at all, in fact; he is too fixated on the heartbeat of their carriage driver, strong and loud in his ears.

He is hungry like nothing he has ever felt before, and some instinctual part of him knows it will only be sated when the carriage driver’s heart has stopped.

Ryan notices Geoff grin. “You’re hungry, huh.”

“I don’t understand,” Ryan says. He can feel his canines lengthening into points at the thought of a meal. All of these changes should terrify him, but they seem unimportant in the face of this new hunger.

“You _do_ know what a vampire is, right?” Geoff asks, an amount of skepticism in his voice.

“A myth.” 

“I’m real,” Geoff points out. “You’re real. And hungry. That’s not a myth.”

—

Later, he will scream at Geoff for doing this, for allowing him to kill people, for turning him into a creature that cannot even glimpse the sunlight.

Soon, he will swear off human blood entirely for years and feed only off animals (including a neighbor’s bull he calls Edgar).

In the coming years, Ryan will begin to search for the answers that Geoff will not or cannot provide to him, and those answers will end in fire and blood and water, in death and pain.

But now, the carriage stops in the dark coach house and when the driver hops down from his perch, Ryan is waiting there with sharp teeth and sharper hunger, and the blood that spills from the driver’s throat is sweeter than any fleeting human happiness that Ryan had felt in his old life.

**Author's Note:**

> I'm [ryanthepowerbottomguy](http://ryanthepowerbottomguy.tumblr.com) over on tumblr! come say hi! (there's also a lot of tumblr-exclusive writing over there)


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